Luftrausers Finally Takes To The Bullet-Riddled Skies On PS3 And Vita

Luftrausers is an aerial combat game in a bullet hell paradise set circa alternate 1942 and, once today's PlayStation Network update goes live, gamers on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita will be able to blast baddies to their heart's content. Let's celebrate with a new launch trailer!

Coming from the folks at Vlambeer (you know, those guys responsible for Super Crate Box (available through PlayStation Mobile) and Ridiculous Fishing) and Devolver Digital, Luftrausers is one of those games that sounds simple enough on paper, but requires some ridiculously sharp reflexes and an upsettingly itchy trigger finger to master. As shown off in today's launch trailer, “How to train your Rauser,” players only need to worry about one joystick and one fire button to play the game. Of course, you'll be dodging enemy craft, attacking aircraft carriers, completing missions and dodging a ridiculous amount of enemy along the way and, if you'll just take a gander at the videos above and below, you'll see that such activities are far easier said than done.

Vlambeer's Rami Ismail said thatLuftrausers has been in development for two and a half years, so don't let the seemingly simplistic (yet classically beautiful) graphics fool you. The game has been honed to a fine edge, so you can expect extremely tight controls and more than 100 missions to plow through on your PS3 or Vita.

Luftrausers actually started as a simplistic game built over the course of two days as a prototype and eventually released for PC as a free-to-play game. Ismail and fellow game guru Jan Willem decided they wanted to build on that concept and, without going back to play the original, decided to start from scratch and not stop until they felt they had made a game that at least matched the thrills of the original build. In short, they wanted to make a game that was as good as their memory of something they loved and, as is typically the case with such memories, they remembered it far more epically than it actually was.

“When we played the original again for the first time, we were baffled,” said Ismail. “Compared to our updated builds of Luftrausers we'd been playing, the old version felt stale.”

Somewhere along the line, Vlambeer teamed up with Devolver and eventually PlayStation in order to set the game up for a PS3 and Vita release. Originally slated for a 2012 release, the team took an extra year to tighten up all the nuts and bolts and, today, it'll be available as a cross-buy game for $9.99 or $7.99 for PlayStation Plus as part of the Spring Fever 2014 event.